In a Frenzy

Hitchcock’s forgotten masterpiece, at Film Forum.

“Frenzy” (1972) is devoted to the absence of sexual happiness in “normal” life.Credit Illustration by Frank Stockton

Film Forum’s complete Hitchcock Retrospective reaches a suitable climax on its last day (March 27) with a showing of “Frenzy,” the director’s fifty-second movie. Released in 1972, “Frenzy” has been partly forgotten, put into half-shadow by the extraordinary popularity of “Psycho” (1960) and the extraordinary renown of “Vertigo” (1958), a movie that, in a recent international poll of eight hundred and fifty writers, academics, distributors, programmers, and critics, displaced “Citizen Kane” as the greatest film ever made. With its sharp-edged shower and its dried-up corpse, “Psycho” is a loony pop-gothic horror movie, and I’ve never taken it very seriously. “Vertigo” is in a different league, and it prepares us for the very real—and quite different—virtues of “Frenzy.” At the heart of “Vertigo” is the perverse longing of a middle-aged San Francisco man, Scottie (James Stewart), for the face, hair, and body of a vague, plush beauty played by Kim Novak. When she dies, he re-creates her, altering the clothes and hair of a woman he meets to turn her into a simulacrum of the first. Part of what’s so fascinatingly perverse about the film is that Scottie has a beautiful and caring chum (Barbara Bel Geddes) who adores him, and whom he never regards with even a trace of sexual interest. The entire fable suggests that men, once they are no longer green, need some sort of obsession to get aroused—that male sexual passion by its very nature is fetishistic in some way, and that ordinary love and deep disturbance are not so far apart.

“Vertigo” dissolves the actual San Francisco into the heavy symbolic density and visual intricacy of a voluptuous dream: the tempo is slow; the dominant motifs are steep hills, tall trees, towers, a bouquet of pink roses. We succumb with almost masochistic pleasure. Fourteen years later, when Hitchcock returned to his native London, he wanted us wide-eyed and awake. If “Vertigo” is dream, “Frenzy” is reality. Much of it is set in Covent Garden, the crowded fruit-and-vegetable market then at the heart of London. As far as we can see, the entire town is mesmerized—either fascinated or disgusted, and often both—by a serial killer who tries to rape women and then strangles them with a necktie. The killer is a genial-seeming lunatic. But nearly everyone in “Frenzy,” it turns out, is a little crazy, the victim of a generalized sexual misery that Hitchcock creates as the suggestive background to the crimes. The movie’s hapless hero, Richard Blaney, a former R.A.F. squadron leader, is played by the young Jon Finch, who is unusually handsome, with a slender figure and a gently molded chin. Blaney stirs rage among most women, perhaps because he’s attractive but weak; he’s not good enough to want, and they are drawn to him anyway, an infuriating conundrum. The detective in the case (Alec McCowen) puts up with his wife’s pretentious cooking every night, a way for them both to divert attention from a dead marriage. “Frenzy,” with its piles of peaches and lettuces, its constant drinking, is a masterpiece devoted to appetite in all its varieties—but it is most seriously devoted to the perversion of sexual happiness in murder and to the absence of sexual happiness in “normal” life. ♦

David Denby has been a staff writer and film critic at The New Yorker since 1998.